ing
quatrain--incomparable in its peculiar melody and mystery except with
other lyrics of Shakespeare's or of Shelley's, it must, I think, be
admitted that an impartial student of both effusions will assign to
Marston rather than to Shakespeare the palm of distinction on the score
of tortuous obscurity and enigmatic verbiage. It may be--as it seems
to me--equally difficult to make sense of the greater and the lesser
poet's riddles and rhapsodies; but on the whole I cannot think that
Shakespeare's will be found so desperately indigestible by the ordinary
intelligence of manhood as Marston's. "The turtles fell to work, and
ate each other up," in a far more comprehensible and reasonable poem of
Hood's; and most readers of Chester's poem and the verses appended to it
will be inclined to think that it might have been as well--except for a
few lines of Shakespeare's and of Jonson's which we could not willingly
spare--if the Phoenix and Turtle had set them the example.

If the apparently apocryphal Mountebank's Masque be really the work of
Marston--and it is both coarse enough and clever enough to deserve the
attribution of his authorship--there is a singular echo in it from the
opening of Jonson's "Poetaster," the furious dramatic satire which
blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or the credit of the poet
to whose hand this masque has been hitherto assigned. In it, after a
full allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the presence of a poet
becomes manifest with the entrance of an allegoric figure whose
declamatory address begins with these words:

Light, I salute thee; I, Obscurity,
The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe;
I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee now,
Enforced by Fate.

Few readers of these lines will forget the verses with which Envy plays
prologue to "Poetaster; or, his Arraignment":

Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy darkness.

Whoever may be the author of this masque, there are two or three
couplets well worth remembrance in one of the two versions of its text:

It is a life is never ill
To lie and sleep in roses still.

* * * * *

Who would not hear the nightingale still sing,
Or who grew ever weary of the spring?
The day must have her night, the spring her fall,
All is divided, none is lord of all.

These verses are worthy of a place in any one of Mr. Bullen's beautiful